estudio Herreros

estudioHerreros redefines the public areas of the MALBA museum of Buenos Aires.
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MALBA has just turned 15 years old. Its rooms have hosted many exhibitions that have always played as background for the extraordinary collection of Eduardo Costantini and many temporary exhibitions.
MALBA is part of the stream of contemporary art museums of the new generation, assuming that the museum concept itself has transmuted energetically from the classic art archive that manages and preserves its stable collection to a real social condenser in which all citizen groups want to be represented. Now, to celebrate its anniversary and has reopened with an architectural intervention in the museum’s public areas revisited by Spanish architect office estudioHerreros.
According to Juan Herreros and Jens Richter, partners of estudioHerreros, the first condition that the new MALBA must attend is that of being inclusive, receptive, and friendly to a citizen who does not want to know about barriers or elitism promoting hybrid public programs that include research, education, retail, meetings of all kinds and giving access to all. The city must enter the museum and with it, people must find there an environment familiar to them, that they understand that it has been thought for them; where contemporary art is none other than the creative expression of some people who have the same concerns than the citizens.
Within this dialogue between visitors and art, contact moments with the building play a crucial role: crossing the threshold, buying a ticket, leaving a coat in the wardrobe to feel at home, receiving information, learning to use an audio-guide … but also feel privileged client of a store that offers references from the art world, have something in an informal cafe or, relax in your restaurant. MALBA won’t be just visited for its exhibitions, but for many other reasons.
To this end, estudioHerreros has displayed a set of everyday materials, close to industrial aesthetics or DIY, to manipulate them with simple assembly operations, which convey the message that it could have been built by oneself. The project unifies all the activities previous or after visiting the exhibition in a single open space, with a continuous floor that recalls the concrete of the sidewalks, on which are distributed a series of small constructions in wood, steel profiles and aluminium.
This aesthetic and constructive code extends to the reception counters and ticket offices, the shelves and store exhibitors or the big cafe tables, but also to other smaller pieces such as benches, stools and chairs that make up a series of furniture called estudioHerreros for MALBA that introduce a domestic character in the space between the city and the exhibition rooms.
Juan Herreros defines the project as “a great installation built entirely in dry construction that does not intend to compete or affect the original building but to stimulate the interest of the visitors for the contemporary art through the reduction of the solemnity that these places usually offer and many visitors doesn’t feel along with”.